Research On Routing Technology For IPv6 Packet Fowarding

Intenet technology and network performance are both issues attracting a lot of attentions. The traffic in the Internet is exploding as it is doubling every year. Emerging multimedia applications will make the explosion even faster in the future. With the employment and evolution of fiber-optic technologies, the carrying capacity of fiber links is doubling every 12 months to meet the future bandwidth demands. However, according to the Moore's Law, the computing power will only double every 18 months, hence IP routers will inevitably become bottleneck in the Internet. Moreover, multimedia and real-time applications require timing and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, besides bandwidth, that put even more burden on the routers. Therefore, the future growth of the Internet requires design and development of high-speed IP routers that forward exponentially increasing volume of traffic and provide QoS guarantees at the same time.As a next generation Internet protocol, IPv6 protocol is being deployed step by step, and will eventually replaces IPv4 protocol which is widely employed in the Internet. IPv4 protocol has many advantages which lead a wonderful success in the past of the Internet. But its limited address amount restricts the scale of the network. IPv6 protocol inherits the advantages of IPv4 and can offer several new functions such as security and QoS. The most important improvement is its 128-bit address length. However, It's a challenge for network routers based on IPv6 because on one hand, a huge address space will brings a very large routing table; on the other hand, the performance of some core algorithms will come down with the 128-bit address length. So research on IPv6 router technologies will be significantly helpful for the next generation network.The dissertation studies the development of Internet router technologies, based on IPv6 protocol analysis, and focuses on two issues in the area of routing protocol software implementation and packet forwarding technology. The major contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows:1) The dissertation studies the OSPF protocol standard, compares OSPF protocol with RIP protocol, and indicates the difference between them. Based on a thorough investigation on OSPF protocol for IPv6, OSPFv3, the dissertation designs and implenments an OSPFv3 routing protocol software for IPv6. The software preserves protocol consistency and functional integrality, provides higher efficiency and lower cost. In the software implementation, it...